Phil Selway on The Talkhouse Music Podcast

Philip Selway and Ghostpoet, two musicians who had never met, talk for an hour and a half on the Talkhouse Music Podcast, and Selway keeps coming back to doubt. Anyone who knows Radiohead would recognise his drumming, he says, but he knows his limits and still feels a fraud at times. The point where he will feel good in his own skin is always just out of reach, and chasing it keeps him going. One of the worst spells was Radiohead's first trip to America in 1993, on the back of “Creep”, among bands who had all the chops.

They signed to Parlophone just before Christmas 1991, at the top of EMI's building in Manchester Square with its Beatles balconies. Every adolescent dream had come true, and “we were remarkably sober about it”; walking out, he thought they had better get on with it. The band turn 30 at the end of the year, and the sad part, he says, is that they have made only eight studio albums.

In a room together Radiohead can still sound like a sixth-form band until something gels. They change their method with each record, building The King of Limbs from snippets put together on the fly, which he puts down to short attention spans, and playing it live brought in Clive Deamer as a second drummer. Lately the five have been making an effort to share what each of them is listening to, which he finds healthy, and Thom Yorke has just pointed him to a Jeremiah Jae record. “I do not want to know what I'm doing here,” he says of going into anything new. His own songs came alive at Neil Finn's Seven Worlds Collide, where he went as a drummer and heard them fleshed out by Lisa Germano, Sebastian Steinberg, and Glenn Kotche and Pat Sansone of Wilco.

On the best nights on stage the five stop being individuals and he loses any sense of his body. On others, as a drummer, “your dyspraxia has kicked in well and truly that night”. He isn't sure he would want the public watching Radiohead record, as PJ Harvey has just done, and suspects it would mostly catch his studio strops.